2017 will be remembered as the year that Ryanair  bosses got very red faces.  A bizarre decision to change their staff holiday entitlement proved to be a very poor judgement and left most of us thinking they should probably fire the person who made that call. Flight Chaos The changes they made resulted in many pilots and cabin crew having a lot of holiday entitlement to use up.  Knowing that it couldn’t really be denied the jaw-dropping decision was made...

If it wasn't for Brexit the work of Peter Roberts may have been forgotten in the annals of European legislation. But a week on from the government's vote to reject an amendment to the European Union Withdrawal Bill tabled by Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas his work is being debated again. Born in the 1920s Roberts took up dairy farming in Hampshire as a young professional but became so appalled by the suffering of animals in intensive farming systems he started campaigning about...

My father died last week. I don’t mean that to sound too dramatic: he was approaching 70 and had suffered from cancer for a few years. That said, he’d been in remission, and until what proved to be the last week of his life, he was pretty healthy. His doctor was somewhat baffled by his wellbeing, but had advised him to keep doing what he was doing, which included a martini every day at about 5.00 pm. The end was...

British citizens who fear immigrants and thought they threatened their values and way of life were more likely to have voted Brexit And the results, partly driven by narcissism, were regardless of their age, gender or level of education. The research, published in Frontiers in Psychology, identified 'collective narcissism' as a new voting variable. Scientists from the UK, Poland and Portugal measured the effect of xenophobia on voting behaviour, and found that it was strongly related to voting in favour...

A cheeky fox jumped on a tourist bus and went on a sightseeing tour of London - sitting on the upper deck. The curious animal hopped on the bus and went up to the top deck to get the best view of the capital's sights. A worker from Big Bus Tours discovered the fox sitting on the back row upstairs in the open-top double-decker last Tuesday morning as the the vehicle passed Park Lane in central London. Passengers were taken...

Classic British cooking is having a moment. For every ill-contrived Modern-British foam, ‘essence’ or poncey restaurant ‘concept’, there’s a smoked fish trolley, tableside flambé station, or dedicated ‘pie room’ commanding respect in some sprauncy corner of central London. And so they should. British food has a dreadful reputation, at best, but when overlooking bland roast dinners and the unspeakable things our grandparents did with offal, there’s something endearing about the undiluted glamour that engulfs restaurants such as Scott’s, Bentley’s, relative...

One of the magical things about Oasis was the way Liam's rough-and-ready rock blended with Noel's harmonic roll to make one of the most eminent and timeless bands of the 21st century. Like the Lennon–McCartney duo most people side with one or the other, but few would disagree that both the Beatles and Oasis would be half a band if you removed either party. Which is what makes the recent release of new records from the respective Gallagher brothers so fascinating....

According to recent research from OnePoll, 71 per-cent of Brits claim that a roast dinner is “too complicated and time consuming” to cook at home. On top of that, more than a third of adults aged 18-45 believe roast dinner to be so difficult to prepare at home, they simply don’t bother. A meal that’s long been synonymous with British culture (for better, or for worse), home-cooked Sunday roasts could become a thing of the past, with 38 per-cent of...

This September the Saatchi Gallery launched its annual START art fair. The event serves as a showcase for emerging artists around the world. Among them this year were a number of exciting Asian artists: contemporary Indian artist Owais Husain, Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin and Vietnamese painter Nguyen Van Du. This is part of a growing trend which has seen Asian art explode in the UK over recent years. The work of Asian artists has sold for huge amounts at...